REALIZATION OF A HELICOPTER-ORIENTED REAL-TIME DATA SYSTEM FOR RESEARCH, EXPERIMENTAL, AND PROTOTYPE FLIGHT TESTING

Within the last five years most of the major helicopter manufacturers and government test agencies in the United States have investigated or developed more rapid means of determining how well a helicopter performs. There is a common desire to quantitatively measure performance, flight loads, and vehicle dynamics as soon as possible after the test point has been flown. If we expand "as soon as possible" to state "within a time-frame consistent with an orderly progression from test point to test point within a single flight, with little or no delay in the availability of calculated engineering values", we have defined a real-time data system. This paper describes the evolution of what we at Boeing Vertol believe is the first genuinely real-time data analysis system currently operational within the helicopter flight test community. The paper discusses briefly the developments over a 20-year period which have culminated in a combination of airborne and ground-based data systems which can handle all the required computational analyses to produce plots, tabulations, and summaries for report purposes. The data system and appropriate software are described, the increases in productivity are discussed, and we postulate what our experience has led us to believe should be the direction in which the next-generation data systems should be developed. Also described is a data base which stores calculated engineering values for a flight test program and allows merging, cross-plotting, and component fatigue damage calculations to be performed by an engineer operating from a remote terminal.